1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to data protection and archival systems and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for archiving data items from backup storage without using an application resource to first restore the data items.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a typical computing environment, various data items (e.g., emails, word documents, spreadsheets and/or the like) are backed up to one or more storage device (e.g., magnetic tape drives) on a regular basis. The backup may be performed to store and/or protect important, critical data. The data items may be backed up and organized in a proprietary format as backup images. Such backup images, however, are ill-suited for data discovery and/or compliance with various laws and/or regulations. For example, backup images do not index the data items or otherwise facilitate quick retrieval of stored data, which is an essential requirement for efficient legal discovery. Furthermore, backups are more data protection oriented and have traditionally been performed on magnetic tape storage media. Unfortunately, the magnetic tape media does not lend itself to be easily indexed, searched and analyzed based on content.
Archival software may be used for legal discovery (e.g., E-discovery) and/or legal compliance. Archival software perform an indexing process (e.g., Intelligent Indexing) on the data items and provide additional functionality by integrating with various tools, such as case management tools, analytics tools and/or the like. Hence, the archival software improves E-discovery and legal compliance. On the other hand, older (historical) data has been resident in backup tapes for a considerable period of time (e.g., before the deployment of archival solutions in organizations). Litigation (e.g., current, pending and/or the like) may require that the historical data be migrated to disk based archives and be subject to indexing, searching and or advanced analysis. Such migrations may be performed in the event of litigation, knowledge of pending litigation and/or as part of proactive record management. In order to meet the demands of current/future litigation or legal compliance, various organizations need to migrate the data items in the backup images to an archive.
Traditionally, such a migration requires setting up an application resource (e.g., application server such as MICROSOFT Exchange server) to facilitate the data migration from a backup image to an archive. For example, an administrator must configure an Exchange server and provision data storage to restore emails from a mailbox backup or complete Exchange Database images from an aggregate image backup. Then, the administrator uses the archival software to archive the mails from the newly provisioned Exchange server. The organization must also use a specific version of the application resource to perform the restoration process (e.g., restoring from an Exchange 5.0 or 5.5 backup image). The archival software uses the appropriate MAPI function calls to extract individual emails from a message store located in the data storage. As a result, such a two-step process consumes a significant amount of time, money and other resources to migrate the data items from the backup image to the archive. The above mentioned process of archiving the data items from the backup image is inefficient and costly because it needs to first restore the data items and then, archive the data items.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for efficiently and automatically archiving data items from backup storage without using an application resource to first restore the data items.